She stood beside him while he ran through the letters and signed them. "Meeting of the regional vice-chancellors tomorrow, eh?" he said as he handed them back to her.
"Right, chancellor," she said crisply. "Ten o'clock. You may have to take another whirlwind trip to tell them the situation is well in hand."
He grunted and glanced at the messages, scanned them quickly, tossed them into the disposal vent beside his desk. Myra looked moderately disapproving. "What about that possible ship from Mars?" she asked. "Shouldn't you look into it?"
He grunted again, looked up at her, said, "If I'd looked into every 'ship from Mars' astronomy has come up with in the nine years I've held this office, I'd never have had time for anything else. You can lay odds it's a wild asteroid or something like that."
"They sound pretty sure this time," Myra said doubtfully.
"Don't they always?" he countered. "Come on, Myra, wrap it up. Time to go home."
"Roger, boss," she said, blinking all three eyes at him.
Bliss turned on the autopi and napped while the gyrojet carried him to his villa outside Dakar. Safely down on the roof of the comfortable, automatic white house, he took the lift down to his second-floor suite, where he showered and changed into evening sandals and clout. He redonned his gloves, then rode down another two flights to the terrace, where Elise was waiting for him in a gossamer-thin iridescent eggshell sari. They kissed and she patted the place on the love-seat beside her. She had a book—an old-fashioned book of colored reproductions of long-since-destroyed old masters on her lap. The artist was a man named Peter Paul Rubens.
Eyeing the opulent nudes, she giggled and said, "Don't they look awfully—plain? I mean, women with only two breasts!"
"Well—yes," he said. "If you want to take that angle."